1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, a control method of the printing apparatus, and a storage medium which stores a program to perform the control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a printing market called a POD (print on demand), printing production or the like, a business system in which printing is performed according to orders from customers, and acquired printed and output materials are surely delivered to the customers by the appointed dates of delivery is provided.
In the field of the printing market, it is very important to perform mass printing promptly and swiftly. Consequently, an operator who exclusively performs various operations to a printing apparatus is often posted in this field.
More specifically, the operator like this exclusively performs the operations such as replenishment/exchange of expendable supplies such as papers, toners and the like, management of printing jobs, editing of job tickets, transportation of output materials, and post-processes (finishing) such as cutting, bookbinding and the like. In any case, the replenishment/exchange of the expendable supplies is the most important duty in such operator's work. This is because, if the replenishment/exchange of the expendable supplies is not properly performed, the printing apparatus falls into the state that the necessary expendable supplies are lacking during the operation of the printing job.
In such a case, it is necessary for the printing apparatus to interrupt the printing process by once stopping a printer engine. When the printing process is once interrupted, of course the printing is not restarted until the necessary expendable supply is replenished or exchanged, and, even after the printing is restarted, it takes a long time until the printing can be actually performed again because re-heating or the like is performed to the printer engine (such a state will be called downtime, hereinafter).
Under such circumstances, a method of enabling to take a necessary measure before occurrence of the downtime has been proposed. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2010-050883 discloses a method by which printing time prediction for each printing job is displayed as a graph. In this graph, a displayed color of the portion indicating a predicted time at which the replenishment/exchange of the expendable supply will become necessary is made different from others, so that the operator can previously grasp when the replenishment/exchange of the expendable supply becomes necessary. Thus, the operator can prevent the occurrence of the downtime by previously performing the replenishment/exchange of the expendable supply.
By the above method, the operator can previously predict the occurrence of the downtime due to lack of the expendable supply. However, there are some cases where the downtime occurs for a reason other than the lack of the expendable supply. As one reason, there is a printing function for which an operation by the operator is needed during printing. For example, in a head portion confirmation printing function, when printing of a plurality of copies is performed, the printing is once interrupted in the stage that the printing of the first copy is terminated. At this time, the operator confirms the content, the quality and the like of the printed head portion of the first copy. Then, if the operator judges that there is no problem if the printing of the remaining copies is performed, the printing is restarted and continued in response to the operator's instruction, and then the printing of all the copies is completed. Besides, as another reason, there is a function by which printed materials (output materials) are output to a different paper discharge tray for each printing job.
It is possible by using this function to prevent that the outputs materials of the different printing jobs are mixedly stacked on the one paper discharge tray. However, in a state that the output materials of the printing jobs previously output still remain in all the paper discharge trays of the printing apparatus, the printing is once interrupted because the printing cannot be continued. In this case, if the operator removes the remaining output materials from any of the paper discharge trays, then the temporarily interrupted printing is restarted. In other words, it is necessary for the operator to appropriately remove the output materials to prevent that all the paper discharge trays are filled with the output materials. In any case, the above functions are very useful if the operator standing by the printing apparatus can immediately and easily operate and handle the printing apparatus.
However, there is a case where the operator has to be away from the printing field due to some reasons such as other business, a meeting and the like. Under such circumstances, if the above functions are executed while the operator is being away from the printing field, the printing apparatus comes to be in a temporary suspension state until the operator goes back to the printing field and again operates and handles the printing apparatus, and thus the downtime occurs resultingly. For this reason, when the operator intends to move away from the printing field, he/she has to, before actually moving, confirm the printing apparatus such that these functions cannot be executed in operator's absence. However, it takes much time for the work of confirming whether or not these functions are executable during the operator's absence and of performing setting changes as necessary.